June 2009

Every office has one schmuck that everyone hates. He or she is either sweating all the time or complaining about a job/life predicament or just generally being an annoying bastard who gets paid to make you depressed at work. As always, our crack accounts receivable manager Ron is here to the rescue.

Brazil’s main export to the rest of the world is beautiful women, literally. According to the people at APRAMP (Asociación para la Prevención, Reinserción y Atención de la Mujer Prostituida, which you probably don't need to speak anything other than English in order to get the jist of), in 2008 more Brazilians worked as prostitutes in Spain than from any other Latin American country. Those girls with perfect skin and cornrows that all the tourists think are from Nigeria? Nuh-uh. Wrong.

A few Vice staffers kept mentioning a graffiti-covered bus that's been parked around the corner from the Brooklyn office for the past month. We don't mean to be total dicks about it, but the thing looks like something the cast of Fraggle Rock should be driving. Everybody knows that hippies are the closest thing to real-life Muppets, so we sent an intern down the road to see if some Phish fans mistook the intersection of N. 14 Street and Nassau Avenue for Haight-Ashbury.

A dentist friend treated a woman who had done so much cocaine it had rotted a hole between her nose and mouth, as well as perforating her septum. This woman had a three-centimeter-by-1.5-centimeter-wide black rancid pit on the roof of her mouth through which her rotting nose would drip. Her mouth was her brain’s own colostomy bag.

If you've ever been moved by a bumper sticker slogan, boy do I have the book for you. Nick Douglas brings us Twitter Wit, a collection of the all-time funniest Tweets! In the coming post-apocalyptic age this book is destined to become a true classic, or at least high school reading material for a generation conditioned to consume only tiny bits of advertising and self-referential drivel that’s genuinely nostalgic for whatever happened five minutes ago.

Lars Krantz is one of those geeks you bullied all the way through high school for playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to heavy metal. Now he’s turned out to be one of Sweden’s most promising comic artists. Since Charles Burns is near and dear to his heart, he makes really scary pictures with one foot safely planted in reality and the other one in the grave. If you live in Scandinavia, you should pick up his debut comic album Dödvatten (Death Water) before the hype hits-–otherwise you’ll be left without, standing alone like you just dropped your ice cream cone on the sidewalk. Here are some illustrations he did for us of Josef Fritzl, a series called Prisoner of Decay.

In São Paulo, 24-hour services are an old reality. You can find anything any time you want it, including hairdressers skilled at servicing prostitutes and transvestites. I walked into Giva’s beauty salon in the middle of the afternoon and found Ivani Barbosa sitting on the sofa watching television. The clients only start to arrive about six hours later, when Augusta Street, where the salon is located, becomes a living hell. I tried to come back and take photos but no one would let me. But I did get to Ivani about her profession.

Are you an American who wants to go on vacation but don't have a passport because you're a criminal? Or maybe you're just an illegal alien (also criminal)? Amazingly, everyone I met there was either the husband or wife of the second cousin of someone who used to babysit Ricky Martin. Man, you should have come to Puerto Rico with me. I had a fuckin' blast!

By now, if you haven’t watched The Wire or read Homicide and The Corner, the two astonishing books that acted as source material for the HBO series, something’s seriously lacking from your life. If you have, you’ll know that Omar Little, the incredibly violent but still strongly moral stick-up artist, is one of the most compelling fictional creations ever to slam a shotgun into a dealer’s face.
Except he’s not wholly a fictional creation–his life and modus operandi was inspired by Donnie Andrews, a former stick-up artist, convicted murderer, and all-round Baltimore bad-ass. After spending 18 years in jail he’s been working with his local communities back in Maryland and there’s currently a film being made of his life. I recently had a chat with Donnie.